Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Hilda Hilst Online Roundtable

The young Hilda Hilst

Over the last few months I participated in an online roundtable about Hilda Hilst, whose sublime and sublimely perverse novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014) I translated last year. Organized by critic and author Sarah Gerard, the roundtable, which comprised questions posed by Sarah (and translator Caroline Aguiar), and responses by authors, translators, scholars and publishers including Alex Forman, Rachel Gontijo Araújo, Adam Morris, Nathanaël, Stephanie Sauer, and I, does give a deeper sense of who Hilst was, and what she was up to. The conversation is now live at Music and Literature.

One unfortunate aspect of the conversation, however, is that it appears to have been reordered and edited, with some errors inserted, after the fact--by Music and Literature or someone else I'm not sure. Nevertheless, it reflects our real-time online exchanges, and for the most part (or at least my part) did not receive any subsequent polishing. Were we onstage, bodily as opposed to virtually, this is the sort of conversation--without the remixing--you might hear.

One highlight:

Caroline Aguiar: Hilst
was willing to explore the limits of language while going deep into
aspects such as God and immortality. At the same time, she was deeply
connected with the very core elements of human existence, such as
passion, comradeship, life, and death, often finding inspiration not
only in philosophical books but also books on biology, physics, anatomy,
and math. How do you interpret the fact that the public is now more
interested and prepared to embrace Hilst’s view of literature than any
time before?

Nathanaël:
This seems a recasting of the first question of our conversation. As I
think a number of us have indicated previously the question of the
timeliness of these translations seems to mislead the apprehension one
might have of Hilst’s work; John has underscored the degree to which
this is already an Anglo-centric question, since Hilst arrived in other
languages well in advance of these efforts here; so perhaps the question
is one, if it does indeed need to be asked at all—and I’m not
personally convinced that it does—of the English language’s belatedness
and hitherto lack of receptivity. And the way in which borders between
languages are more or less passable. On the occasion of the U.S. film
release of Macunaíma in 1968, the U.S. public’s ability to receive the
work was, according to one critic, limited by its impoverished
understanding of Brazilian specificities and political realities within a
larger South American context, with which it was somewhat more
familiar. It would seem to me, though, that this kind of limitation is a
consequence of a kind of deliberate ignorance. And I am concerned that
the same kind of short-sightedness can lead us to congratulate ourselves
misguidedly for identifying a particular moment as a zeitgeist.
Literature has no time and articulates itself reiteratively with a
reader.

Alex Forman:
Caroline makes an important point about the elements of the
metaphysical in Hilst’s literature, ideas brought over from other fields
such as philosophy, math, and science. And though I don’t immediately
see the math, I do find biology, and I want to think more about this… I
do see a predominant focus on literature itself (the notion of
Literature) in a sort of meta-textual writing and the Metaphysical. In
the books I have read, there are monster narrators who eat little
children; we have children whose living uncles turn into great authors
of Brazilian literature (in a game of smoke and mirrors) and narrators
who speak from beyond the grave. We have multiple interior voices—some,
like John mentioned earlier, come from Hilst’s fascination with
recording seance-like encounters with spirits, while others seem to be
simply the “voices in our heads” at play in her fascination with mental
illness. So many of these elements are in communion with Brazilian
culture. They end up being the manifestation of a cultural reality, a
stream that runs permanently beneath the surface here, so much so that
it is never described but simply permeates daily rituals. Hilst works it
all into her literature as fantastical and absolutely natural, absorbed
and accepted by her characters in such a way that we, her readers, come
to accept it too.